[crossfire] Unbalanced spell types

[Mark Wedel]

Andreas Kirschbaum wrote:

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      I think the damage should be scaled down by the monster size (measured
     
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      in tiles it occupies). This would mean a spell deals full damage only if
     
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      it hits the whole monster (i.e. the spell covers all monster tiles).
     
     
  Do note you need to cover rounding issues.  In the case of the greater demon 
(42 spaces), that could be a considerable amount of damage.

  And ideally, this should be handled after damage (or maybe as part of) damage 
reduction from protections is taken into account, since that also has rounding 
errors (but I think those might have been fixed by randomly determing if the 
remainder does damage).

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      Note that bolt spells currently do have the same problem and deal
     
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      different damage depending on how you hit the monster: hitting a hill
     
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      giant vertically will do double damage compared to hitting it
     
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      horizontally.
     
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      For this spell type I cannot think of a simple solution that works correctly:
     
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      just scaling down by either MIN(monster width, monster height) or
     
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      MAX(monster width, monster height) either does not fix the problem, or weakens
     
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      bolt spells for no apparent reason (to the player).
     
     

  Well, the direction of the bolt could be determined and adjusted accordingly. 
  The gotcha is that perhaps how much of the monster you hit should be of relevance.

  If we take the area spells above, it is certainly likely that any spell will 
only hit a portion of the monster.  So cone/explosion spells are generally going 
to be weaker from that change.

  Having the same logic for bolt spells doesn't seem unreasonable - if a bolt 
only hits 50% of the creature, it only does 50% of the damage.

  That said, one thing I said long ago and hasn't been done is the idea that a 
monster (or other object) no longer needs an archetype to cover the extent of 
its image.  With the big image support, a hill giant can be changed so that it 
is only 1 square, but still appears 2 spaces tall.

  Likewise, demon lords could be greatly reduced in size - their full height 
doesn't have to be set.  So that can be done to also reduce the footprint of 
many monsters, also fixing the problem to some extent.

  That said, some monsters, like dragons, can't really be fixed in that way.